I did something smart many years ago. I decided to start a
database of FTW entries. I had no idea that this many years
and over 6,700 entries later, I would still be keeping it. The
database was in this format
| Date | Title | Description | Photos | Videos |
I have been incredibly grateful over the years
to have this record because if I'm looking for a photo, for
example all I have to do is search the database and within
seconds, it lists for me where to find all examples of that
photo. Same with "I think I wrote an entry about and
such...did I?" Just do a search and voila...all entries
that match that subject.
Now I stored the database on my E drive, which
was where I stored all of my database stuff. Long ago, I
decided to store NOTHING on the desktop hard drive because
computers are forever dying. But surely external hard
drives didn't do that, did they?
Most of my documents are on the F drive, where
the word processing, and journal documents are.
In about March of last year, I decided that JUST
TO BE SAFE, I would make a back-up of the journal entries on my
C drive and so did that All the entries from March 2000 to
March 2017. Occasionally I am smart.
And then the E drive crashed. At first I
was disconsolate, thinking that the record of all 6,700+ entries
were gone. But then I remembered the backup
and...voila! There it was. Only five months of
entries to bring it up to date. I usually update the
database at the end of each month, not daily. And when I
do it it takes me about 30-60 minutes to do and almost always
involves my skipping an entry somewhere in the middle and having
to go back and do a week or so over again.
BUT at least I had not lost everything.
AND I was going to be smart about it. I was going to save
the database on the C drive, on the F drive and on a flash
drive. And I would keep all three copies updated monthly.
I bought myself a couple of 36 gig flash drives and first copied
ALL of my WordPefect files on that (surprised to discover that
it took only a teeny corner of the drive, so all my WP files are
now backed up) and then I started updating the journal database.
After two days of this I am so bored with my
life!!! Updating involves at least skimming thru every
entry to remember what subject(s) I talked about, and which
photos I used. So it's essentially re-reading everything
for the last five months and I am bored silly with my life over
the past five months!
I took lots of breaks. When I finished a
month, I would go and Do Something (like watch National
Velvet, for example, which gave me an hour and a half break
and a big catharsis so I could sit and cry and not feel
self-conscious about it), or have a second or third lunch before
going back to the next month
But it is FINISHED!!!
I also keep a database of all the books I read
and that hadn't been backed up since March either, but that was
a fairy simple thing to do -- the hard part was adding all the
pages I'd read for the year, but I will assume that I didn't
make any mistakes on the calculator--and if I did, nobody will
ever know or care.
The movie database is much easier. When
you only see one or two movies a year, it's not a big database
and, miraculously, I had already backed up our one movie for
2017 (Beauty and the Beast, which we saw when Caroline
was here) so I just had to copy it onto the flash drive.
In the morning I wrote the review of Octoroon,
which we saw last night. I reviewed it for the Sacramento
paper and now I have to write the review for the Davis paper.
It was one weird show and very difficult to
review. It's a revision of 19th century anti-slavery
melodrama written by an Irish playwright. The revision is
written by a 32 year old African American playwright
It is your standard melodrama plot (plantation
foreclosure, sweet thing to be ravaged, slaves to be sold and in
the end salvation at the last minute), but I never heard the
N-word used so many times in my life, by both the slaves (3 of
them) and the plantation owners. The situations are meant
to be broadly funny to get people thinking about the issues and
though this was written a couple of years ago, in light of
Charlottesville and all that is going on right now, it is very
timely.
The situations are so horrendously offensive
that you find yourself sitting there wondering "is it ok that
I'm laughing at this?" The hero is a back man playing a
white man in white face, then there is a white man playing a
Native American in red face, and a white man playing a black man
in black face. (there's even a white baby doll in black
face).
(The Southern Belle, however, was perfect).
Walking out of the theater at the end of the
show, I heard someone say something like "I really enjoyed that,
but don't know what I just saw." A white woman told
me it was the worst thing she had ever seen at that theater and
was a total waste of 2 hours, while a black man said he loved it
and had seen it three times before. The reviewers stood
around and discussed it. A woman who also writes for the
Sacramento paper told me that usually when I'm the one writing
for this theater, she's jealous, but this time she was glad it
was me and not her.
The shorter Sacramento review turned out to be
easier than I expected...it's the longer Davis review that is
going to be the tricky one!
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